The Five Keys to Excellence

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By Stuart Alpert, Psy.D., LCSW

Although, written in the language of therapists and healers, this article is for everyone. We are all healers at heart. Our heart and our spirit want us to heal ourselves, our friends and loved ones. For professional psychotherapists and healers, we add the healing of our clients. What are the five key elements that allow for deep healing and transformation to occur? What makes up a great psychotherapy/healing session? What do we need to do to understand our client’s and other peoples’ process in order to co-create transformation with them? Remember, although this article is written in the language of client and therapist, you can adapt this format for all people and for all relationships.

When attempting to help clients, the first question most therapists automatically ask themselves is, “What should I do?” In actuality, this is the last question that needs to be asked. Going to the “What should I do” question first will overlook many of the factors that lead to understanding our clients, providing an energetic invitation for our client’s to look deeply into themselves and to allow for deep and lasting transformation to take place.

When we integrate the five elements, we have developed a roadmap for understanding every emotional, energetic, relational and physical experience and ailment in our clients. Then technical skills can flow from the integration of all of the elements and we are able to know the very center of our client’s issues and how to guide them toward a more self accepting, centered, grounded, balanced and harmonious existence. Let’s leave the, “what to do in the session” question, for last and look at the creation of a session from the roots on up to the blossoming of excellence.

The experiences that need to be focused on before the, “What do I do” question, are:

1. The ability as therapist/healer to live mindfully in each session. This means that we possess an awareness of self so that we have the ability to know what we are experiencing every moment of a session. We are aware of all of our responses to our client, no matter what those responses may be; happy-unhappy, involved-uninvolved, calm-agitated, engaged-bored, loving, compassionate, sad, angry, frightened, hopeless, unknowing or confused. The list is endless. Our job is to bring awareness and acceptance to all of our feelings. In this first key we are involved in the development of our professional self through the evolution of our personal self.
2. The ability to be aware of moment to moment shifts in our client’s energy, emotions and body. As we focus on the subtle shifts in our client’s energy, emotions and body, we are more attuned to how our client is absorbing or resisting the therapy process and the nature of their defensive organization. We also become increasingly aware of their unspoken emotions and attitudes.
3. The ability to understand the basis of all emotional, energetic and physical issues. Understanding the specific dynamics that create the issues that our clients bring to therapy allows us to feel clearer and more agile in each session. We learn how certain childhood traumatic energies create specific dynamics. Furthermore, we become more aware how our clients’ living away from ground, center, heart and spirit, creates any variety of clinical, relational, work related and physical issues. We can emotionally and energetically hold how our client’s lack of awareness about their unresolved childhood trauma perpetuates their inability to resolve and heal the issues that they bring to therapy. Their lack of awareness also perpetuates their fears, depression, helplessness, tension, stress, and inability to co-create intimacy and love in their life.
4. The ability to understand how transformation takes place at any given moment. Any two molecules coming together create the transformation of both molecules and new compounds or new life is created. Two parts of hydrogen with one part oxygen creates water. An egg and a sperm coming together create new life. The same is true when a molecule of understanding, acceptance and love meets whatever emotion, dilemma or difficulty our client presents. When our client embodies understanding and caring, when they can understand and love themselves, transformation and empowerment are immediate.
5. What to do. It is only the fifth key that has anything to do with technique. Although we teach technique, when technique emerges from the integration of the other “keys,” our use of technique becomes organic and creative rather than mechanical and intellectual. Then technique emerges from a deep place of wisdom and the ability to see the very essence of our client’s issues. As therapist, we become part of a live process that we and our client are cocreating.

Let’s return to and expand each of the five keys and discuss how they relate to one another.

The first key is the ability to live mindfully moment to moment.

Living mindfully is about a continuing commitment to develop our professional self through evolving our personal self. As we evolve, we remain grounded and centered more of the time. Our commitment enables us to know our feelings each moment of a therapy session and to develop emotional support to accept and have compassion for whatever it is that we are feeling. Without this ability to know and support all of what we feel, we lose ourselves; we become less embodied, as our only focus is on our client. If we lose our sense of self and therefore, we are unaware of our own experiences, we easily become fused with our clients in a countertransferential relationship. Furthermore, without the ability to ground ourselves in our own emotions, we often express unreal warmth and understanding, we try too hard to take away our client’s pain, and we become easily frustrated and controlling, while in reality we are distant and uninvolved and overly technical.

Our ability to truly know ourselves creates our ability to deeply know our clients’ emotional, energetic and body dynamics, and through our own experiences we have a first hand understanding of the science and the soul of transformation. I am referring to the acceptance of our own feelings and being able to understand what it is about our client that touches us in the way that it does. This will lead us to understanding what we need for our next step in becoming more integrated.

Integration occurs as we embody our feelings. In turn, embodiment occurs by bringing support to each experience so that we know in our bodies that everything that goes on inside of us is simply an experience that we can make room for and live into. This allows us to avoid living in denial of anything that we feel and to bring acceptance and kindness to each feeling. The more that we are accepting and compassionate with all of our feelings, the more that we are accepting and compassionate with our clients. We can only be aware of those aspects of our clients’ process that we see about ourselves. Where we are blind to our own trauma or feelings we will be blind to the same thing in our clients.

By being conscious of our feelings and bringing acceptance to them we are not only aware of what is going on inside of us, we are also able to use our own emotions, thoughts, and senses diagnostically. We can ask ourselves what our feelings are here to tell us about our client. In effect, we are asking what it is about our clients that is touching us in the way that it is. “What is it about my client that I feel accepting or rejecting, open or withdrawn, happy, sad, angry, confused, blank, helpless, wanting to take care of the client, cautious, sexual, fully alert or about to fall asleep; an infinite range of feelings that we may have in relation to a client.

We are not ignoring or denying our feelings. It is just the opposite. We want to be conscious of how we are being impacted so that we can look deeply into what it is that our clients are doing that impacts us in the way that it does. We also need to understand what our experience is here to tell us about ourselves in order to use our feelings diagnostically and, at the same time, not blame our clients for how we feel. It’s as if there is a constant ticker tape of self and other awareness going on inside of us that is moving us to evolve toward greater and greater consciousness.

An example of knowing and trusting our own reactions and being able to use our emotions diagnostically can be seen when our client feels that nothing we are doing is helpful. Underlying our client’s reaction maybe a deeper, unspoken reality where they want us to save them from having to feel their own trauma. If we are fused with this client’s upper level experience, that nothing we do is helpful, we may continue to try harder and feel that we must say something better and brighter; that it is solely up to us to provide the perfect intervention. If our client’s pressure energizes our own pressure, we will eventually feel inadequate by blaming ourselves that nothing we are doing is helpful. We might remain over involved to compensate for our insecurity, become uninvolved and stuck because we don’t know how to process our feelings of helplessness, or frustrated and angry that the client isn’t growing.

Continuing with the above example, if we are conscious of how we feel and can ask ourselves “what it is about the client that touches my feeling of pressure,” we remain conscious and supported in ourselves and can be aware of the client’s underlying feelings and energy. By asking ourselves about the client’s energy that is co-creating the feelings in the session, we can realize that the client is in resistance by remaining unformed as an expression of a secret and unformed way of saying “save me!” We can also know that the client possesses underlying negativity and revenge about taking anything in and that they want someone to pay for the abuse they have suffered. Furthermore, we then can see how our client is living as a victim and acting out the revenge and the unformed, unspoken desire to be saved. As we become aware of the client’s unformed, “save me” dynamic, we can deal with this central issue in a clear, open and direct manner without feeling judgmental. In fact, without dealing with this issue the therapy will easily becomes bogged down.

The second key to excellence is simply deepening our awareness of our client. As you already may be aware, we have already been discussing the awareness of our client. We need to be always asking ourselves; “what do I see about my client’s way of living their experience?“ We want to know more than what their experience is. We want to know more than the content, the story, of what they are sharing. More importantly, and what has the potential of bringing the session to a deeper, core place, is how the client is living their experience. We are focusing on the question of how the client feels about the way that they feel. We are looking at what the client’s relationship is to their own experience.

That is, does my client feel accepting and compassionate toward his or her self? Are they able to take in support and caring from us for how they feel? Do they keep themselves isolated even as they are talking about their feelings? Are they pressuring themselves to be different than the way that they are? Do they want to be saved? Are they intellectualizing their story and not feeling what they are saying? Are they sharing irrelevant details that take them away from themselves? We want to understand how our clients are embodying their experience at any given moment.

If we follow what has been presented so far, we understand that in any session we can have our awareness of self and our awareness of the client. We still don’t have to be involved with the question, “what do I do.” With just these two key elements under our belt we have a growing understanding of the movement of our client’s emotions and energy.

However, we need to look into the third key to have the understanding and perspective of what we are looking at. Remember, this third key to excellence is the ability to read and understand our client’s emotional, energetic and body dynamics so that we have a sense of what creates our client’s issue. As we discuss understanding our client’s dynamics, we are already living within the awareness of self and other. Let’s not intellectualize our client’s dynamics, let’s open ourselves to feeling what is going on with them.

We are looking at how our clients perpetuate the dilemma that they are in. We are becoming aware of how our client lives in relation to the ground, in relation to their heart and to their own deeper place of wisdom and to spirit. Without a connection to the ground, to heart, wisdom and spirit, our clients are either going to feel themselves as victims of their own process and/or as victims of other people. They will have become hardened, over controlled and emotionally untouchable or collapsed, dense or flaccid and unformed. In any of these body organizations, there is an underlying sense of impotence. The clients will manifest their impotence either through passivity and inactivity or through attempting to control all people and all situations. On the one hand, the clients will feel that they don’t have the personal power to deal their own emotions and with the vicissitudes of life or, one the other hand, over compensates by their rigidity and control. The various compensations that our clients use prevent them from being centered, grounded and in connection with their heart and with spirit. The compensations also prevent a deeper sense of aliveness and intimacy. These compensations are the basis for all of the emotional and physical issues that our clients bring to therapy.

We need to appreciate the same principles of body and emotional organization is true for us as well as for our clients. Appreciating our own humanness gives us permission not feel superior to our clients and therefore, harden and distance ourselves from them, or become depressed and hopeless from a feeling of inadequacy. We co-create our own emotional and physical issues, as well as the relationship issues that we have by the way that we live in relation to the ground, to our heart and to our own connection to wisdom and spirit. We are all human…client and therapist alike. As we will see in the fourth key, transformation is possible for all of us no matter how we feel about ourselves.

If we feel supported and grounded in relation to what we feel in ourselves and what we see about our clients, then what we share with our clients can come from separateness and non-attachment. If we’re living a place of honest and open connection, we won’t feel any pressure to makes sure that the clients “gets someplace.” We stop trying to “fix them.” We can give up the belief that we have to help our clients be different than the way that they are. What we are doing instead, is meeting the clients “where they are.” We are bringing acceptance and compassion to their immediate experience. We are helping our clients take a breath so that they can experience themselves more deeply. With our own feelings of self acceptance and lack of pressure, we are bringing an energetic invitation to our clients to go deeper into their process simply by sharing what we see about them. As we live ourselves from authenticity, our energy itself impacts the session and invites our clients to embody themselves and deepen their experiences.

In our place of non-attachment, there is absolutely no pressure for our clients to get anything. What’s important about this is that in the place of no pressure, we’re not aligning ourselves with our clients’ victimizers. In other words, we recognize that all clients have resistance and can be defensive. We learn to understand and support their resistance, rather than trying to get them through it. If we fuse with our clients’ pressure to feel better and if we feel that we have to develop an effective strategy of how to change them, it will activate their own victimizing energy of pressure and inadequacy and in turn, energize their impasse and their resistance. We need to believe that our grounded, real presence is enough for the transformational process to occur.

We are in the process of understanding how to avoid aligning ourselves with the client’s pressure. As therapist, we are releasing ourselves from the bondage of feeling that we are “not enough” by being able to support the feeling of “not being enough” when it occurs. If we support this feeling as an experience we don’t need to act it out. We are using this feeling diagnostically to further understand our client. In this way we are allowing our compassion and understanding to deepen. By living our own process with awareness and compassion, we may simply feel that we wish that our client wasn’t so stuck and bound by old, negative beliefs. We might have a feeling of caring or even over protectiveness.

Again, we have the option of trying harder to get our clients through their stuckness. Taking this road, we would probably wind up feeling tired and frustrated. We will be using too much energy trying to convince the client that there is a more effective way for them to live. Rather than attempting to devise a more effective technique, we could share how we feel with our client. The sharing would need to be real and at the same time have therapeutic value. For example, we might tell the client, “I feel sad that you are stuck and I would love to help you feel more powerful and alive. I know that being stuck doesn’t feel good and at the same time, it is a safe way of being. I would love to surround you with caring and supportive energy. It’s what you’ve always needed. Is it possible to feel and absorb the supportive and caring energy?” If, for a moment, we skip to discussing technique, we can say that simply sharing what we feel from separateness and non-attachment is the foundation of all technique and is a powerful tool in and of itself. The therapist needs to be clear that the sharing is for the client’s benefit, not for the therapist’s need to discharge their own feelings.

From our non-pressured place of separateness and non-attachment, what we’re sharing can break the fusion of pressure that we are in. We are just sharing ourselves rather than putting all our efforts into helping the client grow. Therefore, everything we say becomes an experiment and however the client reacts is perfect. It’s perfect in terms of giving us more information and understanding of our client’s process. If we don’t have to “change” the client, if we believe that meeting the client where he/she is at, is what makes growth possible, we can remain open hearted and non attached.

There is no agenda, no goal. So far, in the first two keys to excellence, we are staying connected to ourselves and reading the client’s energy. We are also being real without being narcissistic. On the surface of things it might look as if we aren’t doing anything or it might seem that we are just “hanging out” with our self and with our client. In-Depth Body Psychotherapy is a model of therapy that encourages mindfulness and non-attachment, continuing development of self, and the awareness at deeper and deeper levels, of what is going on with the client. As we live from non-attachment, we see our client and all the nuances of their process at deeper and deeper levels. The energy of non attachment is what holds the session and allows the client to support and accept where they are, rather than resist their experience.

I’m reminded of a supervision session that I had with a student in the training program. The student’s client felt that she had to know what was taking place in her session every moment. Her need to know came from her controlling, intellectual defense. The need to know in this way prevented her from softening into her body and experiencing life, rather than thinking about life. Her controlling need caused her to feel frustrated and critical. In fact, frustrated and critical was how she always felt about herself. She didn’t have an ability to accept her feelings of “not knowing.” Growing up she was never supported to be a child who didn’t understand something. She was constantly pressured to be the best and the brightest. Actually, accepting our experience of not knowing is an important step to have embodied knowing for all of us. As this client became more frustrated and angry with herself her energy backed up inside of her. She started to feel more unreal and supercharged (hysterical). What I mean by hysterical is that although she was crying, her tears were tears of frustration, rather than grief and the tears were stuck in the upper half of her body. She couldn’t relax and allow herself to “ground her tears.”

Typically, a therapist at this point might try hard to have the client stop pressuring herself. The paradox that the therapist was confronted with is that the client would feel pressured to not pressure herself. That is, trying to be in a different place other than where she was, although good intentioned, activates the victimizer of pressure. I helped the therapist experience her client’s dilemma and share with the client what she saw. The therapist was then able to say; “I see how much you want to drop in your body and how much you have to stay away from yourself and not drop at the same time. If you relax and give up the pressure it is going to activate all of the ways you were consumed with pressure.” As the therapist said that, the client calmed; she relaxed and she felt met. Before the therapist shared what she saw with her client, she was trying to figure out what she believed would be the right thing she could do to help her client ground. As mentioned above, the therapist’s pressure to be a “good therapist” was activating the client’s pressure and at the same time, the client’s resistance. These combinations of experiences, was reinforcing and perpetuating her hysteria.

Let’s look at another teaching and supervisory session with a beginning therapist in order to elucidate the importance of the first two keys to excellence. Imagine yourself as the therapist that I’m supervising. First of all, I could start by asking you (the therapist) to tell me what you see about the client. Tell me about their body; how their body is organized — tight, rigid or flaccid muscles, aligned, broken or fragmented? Do the different parts of the body seem that they belong to the same person or are they disproportionate to one another? Does the client seem grounded? Where do you sense the client’s center of gravity is? Now tell me about what you see in relation to how the client is responding to you physically, energetically and emotionally.

Then, I would ask you how you feel about what you’re seeing. Are you aware of what you feel in terms of the client or have you lost a sense of yourself? I want to help you balance how you hold your sense of the client and how you hold your own sense of self. We’re slowing down the pace of the session. We’re going to experiment with what you see and at the same time, see what it is like for you to stay aware of yourself in every moment. How you hold both foci may seem disparate for you. You may have been taught to only focus on the client and believe that there is something wrong about focusing on self. In fact, it may touch a feeling that you are doing something wrong by focusing on yourself as well as the client. Perhaps it touches an old childhood belief that you are only supposed to focus on everybody else and that focusing on yourself is narcissistic.

Actually what I’m suggesting is that you need to focus on yourself, not in a narcissistic way, but rather in a way that supports separateness and non-attachment. In this way, you will be able to practice knowing the difference between which experiences are your clients’, which are yours and which are happening in the interpersonal field between the two of you. Also, by feeling comfortable with your own and your client’s feelings, you will have a greater sense of when your sharing is narcissistic and self serving and when it is therapeutic. You will also develop a greater facility of when to share yourself with a client and when not to. You will have a keener sense of when your sharing is going to add something to the client’s session and when will detract from it.

There are therapies that advise us to never share anything about ourselves with the client and that sharing with the client is an invasion or a loss of boundaries. That belief brings a rigid separateness into the session and the rigidity will affect the nature of the bonding that you will be offering the client. The deeper you accept whatever it is that you are feeling and have the flexibility to share or contain your feelings, sensing how it will benefit the client, the more you are aligned in yourself and energetically flowing. Only through self acceptance can you come to a place in yourself where you see the depth of your client’s process and authentically accept the person across from you. So far, in this supervision session there is no discussion about technique.

We need to be able to understand the first four elements and hold them inside of ourselves at any given moment. The final element is to learn and integrate the techniques of the therapy. All of these five elements can take place parallel to one another, like various dimensions or transparencies that we can learn in relation to one another and that eventually operate together in one smooth and integral whole.

Fourthly, what is the science and the soul of transformation? It is very, very simple and elegant. It is awareness, acceptance and love. This is what Fritz Perls talked about in the 70s. The moment we bring awareness and consciousness without judgement to any experience, transformation takes place. What that means is that in bringing consciousness to an experience, we’re bringing the energy of acceptance, giving up resistance, and allowing our molecules to come together. As two molecules come together like sperm and egg, transformation takes place; something begins to grow inside of us.

For example, bringing acceptance to the fact that I am in role layer allows me to move beyond role layer. The moment I bring acceptance to being stuck and all of the different aspects of impasse, the moment I can relax into my body and move through impasse. The moment we bring support and acceptance to death layer, we move through death layer. That is, as we live inside the experience of death layer and we and don’t fight it, our bodies relax and we open to aliveness and to spirit. Transformation occurs through our sense of being and not doing.

Continuing to understand the value of acceptance to transformation, let’s look at the feeling of hate. The moment we accept our hate is the moment we start to love ourselves. As we stop fighting and judging our hate, we realize that hate is only an experience to be lived, not a statement about who we are that is written in stone. The same is true for sadness, emotional pain, need, fear; any and all feelings.

At this point, let’s weave in some discussion about technique.

As we have seen, in any given therapy session, we can live within the knowing of self and other and not have to do anything more than share with our client what it is that we see about them. It’s not that there aren’t many other possible interventions. However, it is worthwhile to practice simply sharing with our client how we see that they are organized in their body and in their emotions and how this affects their sense of well being and the way that they live their lives.

Then, whatever else we will learn about technique can live inside of us and be held like a smorgasbord of possibilities of what we can do with our clients. At the same time, we are also holding the other four keys inside of us.

We are:

1. living into our own internal experience and, at the same time,
2. deeply seeing the movement of our client’s energy and emotion,
3. understanding the client’s dynamics and
4. holding a sense of how transformation takes place.

Now, there is an automatic, organismic movement within us, that chooses the technique that is going to highlight and bring support and acceptance to the client’s experience and allow for their transformation toward greater acceptance and aliveness.

We’re going to develop a sense of what it is that the client needs regarding acceptance, connection and contact. We’re also going to develop a sense of when no amount of acceptance, connection and support is going dissolve impasse; when sharing with the client what we see is not going to be enough. This is when we begin to employ techniques from the buffet of possibilities that are stored in our body/mind memory.

In-depth body psychotherapy and subtle energy healing offers a myriad of technical possibilities of “what to do.”

• Mindfulness
• Grounding
• Support
• Safety and protection
• Heart and self love
• Taking personal responsibility
• Connection client’s inner wisdom
• Connection to spirit
• Working with spirit guides
• Helping the client dialogue with their all of their experiences, including their emotions, their stuckness, and their physical symptoms
• Working with inner darkness – negativity
• Victimizing work
• Inner child work
• Working with body process
• Working with dreams

For example, our client may not be able to move through impasse because he/she believes the negative voice inside of him/her is justified, that their parents were right about them. To break the fusion may require us to help our client become the victimizer so that they can understand the energy that is in the way of dissolving impasse. (You can refer to the article on Working with Victimizing Energies).

If the client is living in revenge, there may come a time when anything you offer is going to be defeated. This is when you need to step out of the way and stop offering anything. Working with a spirit guide to help guide the session is a possibility at this point. It is the guide that will determine the next step that the client is ready for, rather than us trying to determine the perfect, next step. Our work is to help our client develop the inner dialogue with their guide so that their spirit is determining pace and movement. If the client’s revenge holds against spirit, we need to let the client know that we understanding how their revenge was an honest response to the nature of the abuse that they received as a child. We might say to the client, “I understand what happened to you that created the revenge in you system. I want to back you up in your right to have the feeling of revenge. I don’t blame you for feeling that you want to seek revenge as the only power that was left to you when you were constantly abused.

Without pressuring ourselves, our own place of wisdom and spirit can come to the foreground. Without pressure, our creativity, in whatever form that it takes, can emerge. This may be in the form of intuition, imagery, thoughtful knowing, sensory and/or emotional knowing, the client’s spirit talking with us, or an integration of all of the above. We come to this knowing spontaneously when we make room for ourselves and our clients, when we make room for “not knowing” or being stuck.

We help the process along when we identify with the client. Paraphrasing a famous Thich Nhat Hanh poem: “I am all people, I am all experiences, I am the river pirate who raped the girl and threw her overboard, I am the girl who was raped, I am all the negativity in the world, all the aliveness in the world, all of the heartlessness and potential assaults, as well as all of the love, understanding and compassion that exists.” Therefore, we can know all experiences first hand and when we tap into this level of knowing, we bring deep acceptance and an energetic invitation for the client to experience, accept and bring compassion to themselves no matter what it is that they feel.

How we live our own inner process propels the session. When we live in support of ourselves and can see our client in the depth of their process, our grounded and heartfelt energy moves the session. We are now working effortlessly. We don’t work effortlessly when we are blocked from self acceptance and understanding our client, when we are blocked and wrestling with our own demons, our own victimizers, our own impasse. Unaware and unconscious, we are doomed to pressure ourselves and work from role layer.

For example, it’s not that we feel stuck at times that is a problem. If we do feel stuck and bring acceptance to “stuck,” we can allow for transformation of our own stuck feelings. Knowing this, we bring this understanding to the session and realize that our client may also be stuck. We might then become aware that we want to “save our client. If that is the case, we could then say to the client, “I feel stuck and I would like to wrap you in an energy of acceptance and love and I would like to whisk away all the negative assaults. “ If we say that from realness and authenticity, it is a technique and it is not a technique because it is an intervention that comes from a place of heart. If we’re not trying to make something happen, we may quickly realize that the sharing, in and of itself, has become the support and connection for the client. It then makes it possible for them to take your heartfelt and supportive energy and transform out of their own stuck place.

As therapist, if we share the same thing with our client without being authentic, it would not move the session in the same way. In fact, it would add to the client remaining stuck. Authentic caring is open hearted. It comes from a place of supporting ourself in whatever it is that we feel. We are being ourselves with our client, not trying to be someone else. Energy matters! Energy follows intent! Our own rigidity, pressure, frozenness, intellectualizing quality will be the energy that’s in the session, not our warmth and caring. Therefore, even though it may be a wonderful thing to say, energetically, you will be appealing to the client’s mind rather than to their heart, rather than to the little kid inside of them. It’s the energy that that comes from us that is centered and authentic that has the ability to stimulate transformation.

We are now working on a subtle energy level. We are responding to the client on a deep body and energy level. We are understanding what it takes for muscles to relax, how cells align in the body, how oxygen begins to flow and feed different organs and organ systems of the body, how the neural system can align and positively mutate. At the same time, we are working at the level of heart and soul. We are responding to the heart and soul of our client. Consciousness comes from a connection of body and mind rather than just intellectual stimulation and intellectual awareness. The more chakras we involve, that is, the more energy centers of the body we involve, creates a different energetic impact for the client vs. intellectually having some techniques at our disposal.

Learning to be a therapist isn’t about learning techniques without the other four keys. It is about living our life deeply from nonattachment and faith that the realness that we bring to the session is vitally important. Deep transformation, at the level of subtle energy occurs with life touching life, realness touching realness, not through cognition and information alone.

I am not recommending that we give up thinking; that we give up our intellect. Rather, we need to embody our intellect so that our intellect becomes a part of the totality of who we are. Our intellect needs to be integrated with our body, our emotions, with all the different places of knowing, rather than our intellect being separate and more than equal. Elevating intellect above our other ways of knowing causes and perpetuates a split in our bodies.

We call In-Depth Body Psychotherapy and Subtle Energy Healing the therapy of non attachment and love. How deeply we can be a part of the transformational process depends on how much of our own work we’re willing to do. Again, it’s not about being “finished,” it’s about being “real.” We can live any therapeutic interaction from dignity and personal power or from helplessness and feeling like a victim of our clients. We can live ourselves grounded and centered, thereby, meeting the challenges of each session and interaction in a way that provides perspective and possibility or we may still be unconscious of the trauma of our childhoods which keeps us away from ground and center. We are all co-creators of our lives. We have now returned to the development our professional self through the evolution of our personal self.

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